Wired, we love it when you make up words. But stop!

“Cybercase v. To scope out a joint using geotagged data written into digital photos posted online. By browsing images of luxury goods on sites like Flickr or craigslist, thieves can often glean the exact location of the loot and then plot a targeted break-in.”

OK – I know Wired takes credit for popularizing terms like crowdsourcing and Great Firewall of China (page 30, same issue) but c’mon.

The topic got a bit of a run after the paper was published. ReadWriteWeb and The Atlantic, probably among others. And yet, a Google search for cybercasing turns up fewer than five relevant references in the top 100 results. And those are all to the paper or to the RWW or Atlantic coverage. This is a word in search of a use case to apply itself to.

But, getting back to Wired: I love it when they “discover” words and it is always worth at least a chuckle, if not some further thought. But please, this is obviously a fake trend story so next time let’s try to couch the definition a bit more:

“Cybercase v. The potential threat, though never actually spotted in the wild, that really intelligent thieves (who apparently prefer crime to a career in IT) might spend their time scoping out a joint using geotagged data written into digital photos posted online, instead of just driving around to the nice parts of town and looking for homes with a week’s worth of mail on the front step. By browsing images of luxury goods on sites like Flickr or craigslist, thieves can often glean the exact location of the loot and then plot a targeted break-in, that is assuming the images were taken in your current home, and the item you put on craigslist did not sell that very afternoon. By the way, if the images were in fact taken at home, you might want to warn your neighbors since the GPS tags are probably going to drop the crooks in their swimming pool.”